A woman stands in a meadow in August, peeling a lemon, and compares herself to a drawing by Van Gogh. In one simile, Mary F. C. Pratt turns her speaker into a figure on a page, fixed and flattened, staring into "the middle distance." The rest of "Sestina for the Summer of 2020" builds on that stillness. It becomes a portrait of drought, ageing and an anxiety the poem never quite names.
Very little happens. The speaker wears her white cap, watches a butterfly and remembers a younger self in lemon cologne, lying beside a lover in a Greek fishing cap. Then the sun beats down on her again. The poem's weight comes from one idea: the dry earth and the human mind have stiffened in the same way. The soil is "hard, cracked, rigid." The speaker's bones "have gone rigid with the years." Her one direct question asks, "Have we yet let go our rigid sense of what is real?" Heat, age and fear all harden things. Only the trees survive, "drawing / their life from deeper water." The poem seems to suggest that flexibility means reaching below the surface.
The sestina is an old form that replaces rhyme with repetition. Six words keep returning, and here they are meadow, cap, lemon, rigid, peer and draw. Pratt loosens the pattern. The first stanza runs to nine lines while the rest have six. The words change shape as they go (capped, peers, peerless, drawn, rigidity), and they shuffle their positions. There is no regular metre or rhyme, and the lines are speech-like and uneven. Enjambment sometimes makes the reader wait, as in "the lemon- / brightness of the sun." The effect is a rigid form with a little give in it, which is rather like the poem's argument.
Because the words are so few, each one has to carry several meanings, and that is where the poem is richest. "Peer" means to look closely, but it also means an equal. The speaker peers at the trees, says her peers "cannot guess," and calls the butterfly "my only peer / now." That last phrase suggests loneliness. "Peerless" is used twice. In the third stanza it describes the lover, and in the last stanza it describes the summer's anxiety, so love and fear are both set beyond comparison. "Draw" means to sketch, to pull water from a well, to approach an end ("The summer draws / to a close") and to pull tight ("this tight-drawn / season"). "Cap" is the speaker's hat, but grasses are "capped with seeds" and a butterfly searches for a plant "to cap / with one pale egg." The hat is her small, stiff shield, while the butterfly's cap is a hope of new life.
The lemon changes most. It begins as something bright to peel and smell, then becomes the cologne of youth. Later it sours into the news ("News sours me, like lemon"), then the bitter rind-taste of the water, and then the colour of dried grass. In the last line the sun itself is "lemon." The fruit she held in her hand in the opening has become the sky pressing down on her.
The poem leaves some things open. We are told that "our bones" have stiffened, yet the speaker "stand[s] alone," and the poem never says what became of the lover. The title fixes the scene in a particular summer, and the mention of "news" and "anxiety" suggests a public worry in the background. Pratt trusts the reader to supply it, which keeps the focus on the physical scene.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. A sestina's circling repetition suits a season when each day feels like the last, and the form lets the reader feel that sameness as well as hear about it. There is no rain at the end and no resolution. The poem returns to "the lemon / sun" that "beats and beats" on a white cap, so that the last line ends on the same image as the start and the speaker is no freer than before.